Gender and the sacred: Zinaida Gippius designing the image of a witch

The article proves that the image of a witch is one of Zinaida Gippius' masks as well as the male images. To justify this thesis, the author involves N. Evreinov's theory of the theatre, G. Adamovich's and Vl. Piast's memoirs and the analysis of Z. Gippius' works, namely the poetic dialogue with F. Sologub (1905), the short story The Witch (1898), the play Holy Blood (1900), the articles Zverebog (Beastgod, 1908) and What Are They Writing? (1912), in the context of the Merezhkovskys philosophical and aesthetic quest. The article examines possible literary sources of Z. Gippius' image of the witch (A.S. Pushkin's and M.Yu. Lermontov's “prophets”, N.V. Gogol's witches and sorcerers). Z. Gippius changes the representation of the theme of witchcraft: the witch becomes not an object but the subject of the story, which is typical for the transformation of female archetypes in modernism. Relations between the hero and the divine also change: the “witch” of the Silver Age takes over the function of communicating with the sacred while the “prophets” in previous Russian literature were only heralds of the divine word. To analyze the ways of constructing the image of a witch, S. Zenkin's theory of the “undivine sacred” is used. To conclude, Gippius does not oppose and even consciously forms his image as the image of a witch - both in her salon and in works of art. However, she is always ironic, realizing that she only uses the stereotypes of her time as a kind “god-beastly” power - since society ascribes this kind of power to a woman, worships the “God” in her and is afraid of the “beast”. In the world of artistic imagination, her connection with the sacred is accessible to her precisely thanks to her femininity - but not “beastly” or “godly”, not objectified, but acting on her own free will.